1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to product setup sharing prior to and during inspection.
2. Background Information
Over the past several decades, the semiconductor has exponentially grown in use and popularity. The semiconductor has in effect revolutionized society by introducing computers, electronic advances, and generally revolutionizing many previously difficult, expensive and/or time consuming mechanical processes into simplistic and quick electronic processes. This boom in semiconductors has been fueled by an insatiable desire by business and individuals for computers and electronics, and more particularly, faster, more advanced computers and electronics whether it be on an assembly line, on test equipment in a lab, on the personal computer at one's desk, or in the home electronics and toys.
The manufacturers of semiconductors have made vast improvements in end product quality, speed and performance as well as in manufacturing process quality, speed and performance. However, there continues to be demand for faster, more reliable and higher performing semiconductors.
Users of inspection equipment continue to demand better defect data thereby requiring better camera and illumination matching. This is further the case from system to system thereby assuring better correlation between inspection systems, such that the correlation in inspection results is very high.
It is known that cameras that are installed on inspection equipment are pre-set with vendor default settings for camera gain and offset. However, this often results in large variations between systems. In addition, light sources, whether halogen or strobe, can have large variations in light output (photons) for a given applied voltage. Furthermore, optics in each system have unique distortions and light transmission efficiencies that are field of view dependent. The result is that tool to tool correlation is in many cases unacceptable to the user.
As a result, inspection system users desire that all inspection systems produce the same image in regards to contrast, scale, warp, histogram, sharpness, etc. for a sample placed on two or more systems. This will best occur using product setup sharing.